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Should you republish old content?

Lots of content you write is timeless. One year from now this article about republishing old content will still be as valid as it is today. Still, if you don’t share it or talk about it, very few people will notice it. A way to make sure your content won’t be forgotten is to republish it. But what’s a smart strategy for that? You don’t want to annoy your audience with old news. In this post, I’ll talk you through different ways to republish your old content.

Why would you republish old content?

A lot of content is valid for a longer period of time. And your audience changes and grows. Things you’ve written a year ago probably won’t be read by your new audience. So, it’s a waste of quality copy if you’d publish it only once.

Moreover, sometimes an article or blog post isn’t picked up properly the first time. Maybe your timing was off. An article that was published in summer, perhaps got little attention because of a very hot day. If you share posts on Facebook, you’ll most definitely notice that some posts are shared and liked much more than others. The reason why some posts are picked up by a large audience, while others aren’t, isn’t necessarily related to the quality of your post. Republishing can be a way to give your content a second chance to reach your audience.

Make sure your content is up to date!

Most important advice on republishing old content is that you should never republish anything that isn’t up to date. Nobody wants to read something that is out of date or no longer applicable. So before republishing, you should do some reviewing and possibly some re-writing!

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Republishing content with minor changes

If you want to republish an article in which you’ve made minor changes, we would advise you to change the last modified date. That way, people are able to see when the article or post was altered last. It’s instantly clear that the information is still up to date.

We would advise you to hide the comments on a post you republish. It just looks weird if you push out an article with comments that are made a year earlier.

When updated, push out your article using social media like Facebook and Twitter. Or write about the article in your newsletter. You can mention that you wrote this post some time ago and that the information is still very useful. You can also choose to treat the republished post as a normal post and do the things you normally do to draw attention to new content.

Republishing old content with major changes

Sometimes you’ll need to make major adjustments to articles. Things can change entirely, making your old article rather useless. Or, your opinion or advice on how to handle certain things might change.

If you make big changes on an article, rewriting the entire text, we would advice you to publish it as if it were new content. You’ll then change the date of the article. Changing the date will enable you to keep all of the links from other websites to your original post (which is great for SEO of course).

Conclusion

Republishing can be a great way to get extra attention to those great articles you wrote some time ago. Make sure to keep those articles up to date, though. And, don’t go overboard! You shouldn’t republish your articles every other week. If people notice you’re publishing the same blogpost again and again, they’ll definitely get annoyed!